


Hold On

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Justified
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, M/M, Pre-Canon, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-06
Updated: 2019-03-06
Packaged: 2019-11-12 15:46:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18013718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: Raylan wears his soulmate’s mark, a handprint wrapped around his own.





	Hold On

**Author's Note:**

> bestillmyslashyheart prompted on tumblr: "I've got another soulmate prompt for you if you want - soulmate marks appear on skin contact during a pivotal moment in a person's life. Like it's not the first touch but it's the first real touch that _means_ something to the person (and it of course can only come from their soulmate)." They also prompted that this happened to Raylan his last day in the mines, and so of course my brain decided to create three other times it might have happened, and here they are.

Raylan Givens wears his mama’s tears. He wears the scars his daddy leaves behind. He wears the imprint of his Aunt Helen’s lipstick kiss on his cheek, the chocolate stains from the candy bar she sneaks him on his fingertips.

He wears his soulmate’s mark, a handprint wrapped around his own.

* * *

It happens the first day of Kindergarten. Raylan has his hand tucked up in his mama’s warm, sure grip, but she pulls him into the classroom and then bends down and kisses him on the forehead, tugs her hand away and hands him his lunchbox and tells him that he’ll be fine and she’ll be back once the day is through. Then she’s gone and Raylan’s left holding onto his lunchbox and trying hard not to cry, because only sissies cry. That’s what his daddy says. Raylan’s surrounded by other kids who all seem to know each other, some girls holding hands and spinning in a circle, some boys playing with blocks over in one corner.

Then someone comes up beside him, grabs hold of his free hand. “Raylan,” the newcomer says, and Raylan turns to see Boyd Crowder standing there, holding onto his hand and smiling brightly. “There you are! Mama promised you’d be here soon.” Boyd turns and starts leading Raylan across the room, holding onto his hand. “C’mon, Raylan. Have you met my cousin Johnny? He’s here, too. Johnny! Johnny, this is Raylan Givens,” Boyd introduces them, swinging his and Raylan’s hands between them, holding on tight. “Raylan is my best friend.”

Boyd’s touched Raylan before this, of course. They’ve fought over toys and shared desserts and thrown balls and poked at the same line of ants crawling up a tree. It’s just that — well, Raylan’s been his mama’s darling and his Aunt Helen’s kiddo and his daddy’s whiny little bitch, but he’s never been anyone’s best friend.

Boyd holds Raylan’s hand all day, except when they’re coloring or eating their lunches or snacks. Raylan hardly misses his mama at all.

She doesn’t notice the mark until they get home, gasps when she goes to help Raylan wash up for dinner and sees five little fingers imprinted on the back of her son’s hand. She can’t hide it from her husband, but he doesn’t pay it any mind. Arlo doesn’t believe in soulmates. Frances never asks whose hand Raylan was holding. She doesn’t say a word about it, not to Raylan, not to anyone else.

Raylan traces Boyd’s handprint, sometimes, rubs his fingers along the marks and hears Boyd say _Raylan is my best friend_ clear as he said it on that first day. It’s years before he learns about soulmates, longer still before he understands just what it means to wear the shape of Boyd’s hand around his own.

 * * *

It happens on prom night. Raylan takes Corliss Young to the prom. He rents a suit with the money he earned over the summer and some of the money Boyd made taking bets on Raylan’s games. He picks her up in his truck, and it’s lucky that the Youngs are nearly as poor as the Givenses, so Corliss don’t complain. Of course, she also ditches Raylan for her friends as soon as they make it into the gym, so maybe she wasn’t too keen on coming to prom in an old truck after all. Raylan pours himself some of the thankfully spiked punch and sits at one of the tables in the back corner of the gym, alone.

Raylan hadn’t been too keen on dancing anyhow, can’t help but be relieved that Corliss’s pink dress has been swallowed up in the crowd. Some of the boys from the baseball team come by Raylan’s table, refill his empty punch glass with bourbon they stole from their parents’ liquor cabinet.They come in a group, Mike and Delray and Monroe and Jimmy Cawood IV. After the championship game last month where Raylan stove in Dickie Bennett’s knee, the other guys on Raylan’s team had kept their distance, as if they suspected that Raylan might be willing to bash their knees in, too. A Givens was a Givens, after all. A few slugs of Daddy’s top-shelf whiskey, though, and they could all pass for friends. They leave in a group, too, once the flasks are empty, and Raylan ain’t sorry to see them gone.

Boyd don’t come by until the evening’s spun itself out, the punch bowl empty and the girls barefoot, their heels kicked under tables and their wraps draped haphazardly over chairs. Boyd is in a white shirt and rented pants, smells like sex and Bennett weed and the aftertaste of moonshine.

“Having a good time?” Raylan asks mildly, when Boyd drops down into the chair next to Raylan’s and hands over the jar.

“Jenna Wright is in possession of a gloriously nimble tongue,” Boyd declares grandly, a little louder than he might have were he in possession of all of his faculties.

“And did you leave her in the parking lot?” Raylan wonders, laughing a little at the overtly pleased expression on Boyd’s face.

“I did not. She’s …” Boyd finishes his sentence by flapping a hand at the rest of the gym, where presumably Jenna Wright has found some new dance partner for her gloriously nimble tongue.

“You didn’t want to dance with her?” Boyd likes to dance, sometimes. Generally only once he’s high or drunk, but occasionally up at the lake he’ll pull a girl in front of the headlights of a truck and give her a twirl. Boyd also thinks he’s a rock star when he’s drunk, and Raylan’s had more than one good laugh at the result.

“Jenna Wright is not who I would most like to pass the time with this particular evening,” Boyd says, and he can’t be that tipsy, because he doesn’t throw himself headlong into the pronunciation of each word. He swivels in his chair, his knee bumping Raylan’s, the shadows on his face shifting as he turns. “Raylan, I –”

“These next songs go out to all you lovebirds!” the DJ shouts over the microphone, and whatever Boyd was going to say is lost. “So hold on to your love and dance the night away!”

Bryan Adams starts playing over the speakers, and Raylan rolls his eyes. He opens his mouth to make some disparaging comment about the music, and leaves it open, because Boyd chooses that moment to take hold of Raylan’s hand.

Raylan stares down at their hands. Lifts his head and stares at Boyd, who is looking determinedly past Raylan at the wall, his cheeks pink even in their dark corner of the gym.

“I don’t suppose –” Boyd’s voice cracks, and he swallows hard before starting again. “Raylan, I don’t suppose you’d like to dance?”

_So hold on to your love and dance the night away_.

“I don’t think that’s wise,” Raylan says honestly, sounds a little hoarse to his own ears. “You’ve seen me dance, Boyd. You can’t want to see it again.”

He looks down at their hands again, at Boyd’s fingers laced with his, at the coal under Boyd’s fingernails and the way his thumb covers the scar on the back of Raylan’s hand from the time his daddy shattered the whiskey bottle and Raylan took a few shards. He squeezes Boyd’s hand, just to prove it’s really there, and Boyd squeezes back hard enough to crack bone.

They hold hands through Bryan Adams and Foreigner and Peter Cetera, only let go when Johnny comes over to rail at Boyd about Jenna Wright.

Raylan doesn’t notice the marks until the next morning, when he looks at his hand in the morning light. _Hold on to your love_ , he thinks, and somehow having Boyd Crowder as a soulmate pales in comparison to having Boyd Crowder hold on to his hand.

 * * *

It happens Raylan’s first day down in the mine. Boyd worked the mine the summer before, worked some during the school year, won his promotion to powder man the day Raylan signed up.

Raylan’s fine on the surface. He’s fine changing into the coveralls, putting on the hardhat. He’s fine going down the shaft. He’s _fine_. And then they step out of the elevator into the dark.

Raylan’s at the tail end of the group, and no one’s paying much attention to the new kid. No one’s lingering by the elevator to see him freeze. Nobody but Boyd Crowder.

“Raylan,” Boyd murmurs, breathes the name into Raylan’s ear, voice lower than the hum of machinery and the penetrating black of the mine. “Raylan.” He squeezes, and that’s how Raylan realizes that Boyd has taken hold of his hand. “Nothing untoward is going to happen to you, Raylan Givens. I swear it on my mama’s grave. I’ll be right here beside you. I’m right here.”

It’s enough to get Raylan moving where nothing else was, not even reminding himself in Arlo’s voice that no Givens wants a pussy for a son. Boyd gets them well into the tunnel before he lets go of Raylan’s hand.

Raylan sees the marks and thinks _I’m right here_. He tells the men on the crew that he’s had the handprint for years, calls it his good luck charm. Boyd dives down into a fresh cut with his Emulex and Raylan presses his fingers into the imprint Boyd left, reminds himself that nothing bad is going to happen. That’s the promise etched into his skin.

“Fire in the hole!” Boyd hollers, grinning wide, right beside Raylan where he belongs.

(“Fire in the hole!” Boyd cries, and the mine comes down around them, and Boyd grabs on to the marks on Raylan’s hand and they run for their lives and make Boyd’s promise come true, after all.

It doesn’t keep Raylan from leaving. It doesn’t make Boyd ask him to stay.)


End file.
